Tag Archives: can haz cheezburger

I found this, as the watermark might suggest to the more clever of you in the audience, on “There, I Fixed It,” the only site in the Cheezburger empire known to routinely amuse and amaze me with its feats of sheer humanity. The site exists to showcase kludges: those haphazard, impromptu, and often ill-advised solutions to problems.

Thing is, I’m not convinced this is a kludge.

I mean, for one, only one of those locks are attached to a non-bike, as near I can tell.

They’re also all the same silver-to-black gradient.

So’s the bike.

Man, that many u-bolts would cost a fortune.

Nope, this is definitely art. You want my guess, it’s an installation piece commenting on us as both a paranoid society, one that needs to lock, relock, and triple lock even the most minor possessions to feel safe. Sadly enough, we’re also a society where someone somewhere would steal that bike if it wasn’t locked down, because, well, that’s what some people do. It just feeds back into point one as a nasty loop, which this does a pretty good job of reflecting upon. It’s a farce of minor theft and disproportionate paranoia (those u-bolts had to cost more than that bike. There’s what, over three dozen of them there? At a bargain-basement $10 a piece that’s still $360!) My best guess on the gradated color scheme is the visual texture it adds to the piece, the silver highlights draw our attention to the individuality of the u-bolts, letting the full seething mass of it strike us without the complexity of hue, and with merging into a giant hairball of metal as it would in true monotone.